Blog: Jun 2015

Under the headline ‘The school that says there’s no such thing as a naughty child’, yesterday’s Mail on Sunday contained an article on a primary school that - as is made clear in a more positive recent feature in Schools Week - is run on restorative principles.

Tucked away in last month’s Queen’s Speech was the line “Measures will be brought forward to increase the rights of victims of crime”. This confirms that the promise contained in the Conservative manifesto to introduce a new Victims’ Law will be delivered during the current parliamentary session.

I first became interested in restorative justice when I was a masters student studying criminal justice policy at the LSE. Each week the course covered a topic and top of the reading list in the week focused on restorative justice was Nils Christie’s legendary 1977 article Conflicts as property. In that year I read countless academic articles, but it is probably the only one that I can remember with any clarity. It is certainly the only one that directly affected my future career choices.